It certainly is a way for Microsoft to make more advertising revenue in the same way that iAds does the same for Apple, AdMob does for Android, and AdSense does for Google Search. The only novel thing I see here is that the ads are for desktop apps.
> It's talking about apps that come with the system, that can't be removed
They can be removed and it's up to the OEM whether they come with the system. I don't recall if a clean install gives you the option to opt out of these apps or not, though.
For sure you can uninstall them if you choose. I meant that I don't recall if you can opt out of them entirely during a clean install, as in they never get installed at all. A "no apps" Windows install.
You'll probably be downvoted for that comment. I reached the same conclusion, but for whatever reason, this will be different for X reason. Something along the lines of "but we don't pay for iOS". Which is a great argument if you don't care about user experience. It's shameful all around, really.
Actually as an app developer I see this as a huge monetization opportunity to me. With a huge installed base of Windows, if I get my app running on some those with the ads powering my app? It's a mouth watering proposition.
Indeed. I don't like desktop apps containing ads, but this is exactly what was predicted to happen with the shift to Metro. Metro, just like iOS and Android, needed a universal way to have ads in apps. This means that Metro apps running on the desktop can contain adds.
It's the existing mobile sphere coming together with the desktop world, and is just a side effect of the introduction of Metro.
I am getting tired of the extremely slanted coverage of Windows 8 on HN. The stories about them selling four million upgrades in 4 days[1] or the web traffic from Windows 8 machines surpassing all of Android in 10 days in the so called post-PC world [2] don't make it to the front page(and will get flagged if they do), but such manufactured outrage or the doom and gloom about how it will fail has no such problem.
Wake me up when they actually use users' personal data like Ubuntu is doing or if the ads are part of the OS like in Explorer, not the silly News app.
I don't mean to be rude, but you all show up in any thread related to Microsoft defending anything and everything they do. It gets old, and while I can understand it seems HN is against MSFT, there is no conspiracy.
My current industry is obsessed with .Net, I use a dumb phone still, and I don't have any horse in the race specifically, but I truly feel these discussions get turned into gadget blog-like flamewars by the likes of you.
I simply don't understand why 'you' seem to care about this topic so much. Personally, I'm contemplating my first 'smartphone' and I would like to understand the trade-offs( it looks like custom Android ROM at the moment), but reading obviously biased comments from either side just makes me sad.
Edit: I don't think any of these $100B industries needs help defending themselves, and if anyone discussing the topic is compensated for their contribution it would be nice to have some disclosure.
You're the one who took a condesending tone, and gives the impression that you don't even want to hear both sides of the story....
You're the only person on this whole page who looks like they're trying to start a flamewar. recoiledsnake and cooldeal are just presenting an unpopular perspective, which is always welcome. I for one dont understand all the microsoft hate here either. Its like everyone still harbors resentment for microsoft from the late 90's, and wont even give them a chance anymore.
I love the open source movement as much as the next guy, but Microsoft is still relevant and good, despite everyones affection for Apple and Google here.
Who cares? Their points are valid. HN does seem, at times, ridiculously anti-Microsoft and Windows 8. As an informed user of Apple, Google (well, HTC) and Microsoft products I find myself disagreeing with the prevailing attitude much of the time, and I'm pleased to see a few people that don't immediately fall into the groupthink black hole.
Even if they are corporate shills, which I doubt, they'd probably be no more biased than many others on the site already.
Interesting that no one ever calls out the Apple shareholders and Google employees who might be having a part in flagging down stories critical of Google or Apple, Paul Thurrott's http://winsupersite.com is autokilled on HN due to excessive flagging for the crime of being a Microsoft watcher sie, but heaven forbid a couple of commenters don't hate MS and you feel the need to call them paid shills and blame the flamewars on them?! Lets drive out the last few posters who don't conform to the groupthink.
How about addressing whether local file search keywords are users' personal info or not instead of pulling an ad hominem?
Yeah. A few other things come to mind: Chrome OS, Android, most search engines, nearly all news channels and coverage, the vast majority of television shows, magazines, most so-called "'blogs," for that matter, most online content, most newspapers, etc.
One could argue that that's just how many of them are staying alive, injecting a bit more life into their business model, which is a reasonable analysis, but I can't help but think it's still sucking the soul out of it. How likely would they be to, say, run a story that will almost certainly cause their biggest advertiser to pull their funding? Or, put another way, if they pulled the ads out and charged a subscription, would people value it enough to pay, or are they more just a part of the stream of noise, largely indistinguishable from the rest of it?
It's sort of unreal how much we all just accept it, and may not even notice it. Call me crazy, but when I see some historical photos, it make me sad that most clothing worn now is either advertising or advocating something, and good luck finding a town largely free from the visual clutter of commercialization, and so on.
And the only cities I've seen that aren't yet like that are in places like North Korea, or places recently like NK.
It should be noted that on the mobile Android and iOS devices you do not see ads on the homescreen, nor in system apps (eg settings). You don't even see them in vendor provided apps like News and Weather on Android and Weather on iOS. The only way to see ads is to deliberately install an app, or use a web browser.
Windows 8 is crossing that line by showing you ads through no additional action of your own. The real debate amongst commenters here seems to be whether this is a major line, or just another one in the long list of those already crossed.
You can visit many parts of Europe to find less visual clutter. Even here in the US my county bans all billboards except one, so it is quite jarring being elsewhere in the country and seeing how prevalent they are.
I must admin being astonished at American's tolerance of advertising. Somehow people are averaging 5 hours of TV watching a day, yet the broadcasts seem to be non-stop advertising briefly interrupted by snippets of programming. Web pages seem to be substantially similar.
Yeah. Please see my other comment. It's not about putting ads on the home screen like we all assumed in the 90s to be the logical conclusion of where we were headed ("one day your car will be free, but it'll be covered with Marlboro inside and out!"), but mobile device usage is increasing and cannibalizing at blinding rates, and the more they can control every aspect of the experience, the better they'll be able to stop the bleeding (which will happen, however good their takeover is), and position themselves for the future. The last thing Google wanted was to watch was Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the mobile OS business, add a dominant share of mobile use to an already dominant share of desktop use, watch mobile become the new desktop (and they touted those stats internally for years before they announced them publicly), and almost certainly wind up the next Yahoo: a company all but a handful of others would be happy to be, but no longer the dominant player, or even a terribly influential one, at that.
(And what county is that, if you don't mind my asking? Sounds like paradise, right about now!)
I was thinking of Android in the sense that they didn't make a phone so they could insert ad slots into the basic UI, but you're totally right.
And personally speaking, just last night I signed in to the dashboard, saw the ads, and thought to myself, "So it's come to this: I have to choose between being monetized by ads, or by rootkits. Great."
Yeah. I love AdBlock, and I've donated. But it still can't filter out pay-to-play content (which, working in the industry I can tell you is far more prevalent than even the most cynical of people think), or anything of that ilk.
And the same thing's true of filtering: I also block all ad, social, and various other tracking networks from my entire network, but that's not going to change the fundamental dynamics at play, unless a really large number of people vote with their eyeballs, wallets, cookies, browser data, referrer data, and so on.
And if enough people did, the stakeholders would just move on to the next gateway (as if they haven't already).
Yeah, that's fair, but shipping with ads isn't the point. The point is to replace desktop apps that aren't capable of serving their ads or contributing to data that will improve their ability to monetize said ads. That, and to prevent someone else from doing the same.
I agree that it's not a the most overt of plays, but for that matter, it's not like Android injects ads into the home screen. Google's smart enough to know they'll kill the goose that way.
It makes the default search engine theirs, the browser theirs, location data theirs, any usage data–however aggregated and non-personally identifiable–theirs, encourages you to store your files with their cloud service (vs. doing it yourself or using someone else's who can't leverage it for ad revenue, e.g., SpiderOak's), and so on, all things that will drive up competitive CPCs and CPMs.
It's about the land-grab that's going on right now, with the major players afraid of seeing the potential future balance of power shifting heavily to someone else, and with the downsides so high, they all want to get in while they can. Think of it as online advertising's own little cold war (but without the awesome fighter jets, spaceships, and submarines!).
Nearly all of Google's revenues still come from ad dollars, and everything they're doing is to make sure they make progress on two fronts: expanding reach, and mitigating the fact that the growth of mobile is killing the revenue they could previously made from desktop activity.
I had dinner with a Google exec last week, and he said to me, "the meme the made the rounds is right: we hate Facebook, but really only for what it's made us become. I miss the days when we all focused on search."
Oh, I completely agree. I was just standing up for Chrome OS. :)
I love the products Google provides (disclosure: I've been a heavy user of Google products since GMail was invite-only) but I have no delusions that they're providing all of these products in part to drive people back through their advertising revenue stream.
What's the difference between this and paying 100 bucks a month to DirectTV? I'm paying 100 bucks each month for the service, why does DirectTV bombard me with ads every few minutes? It seems logical that if DirectTV can behave that way and get away with it, then Microsoft can too.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily an overall societal drain. While I'm not a fan of seeing ads, there IS value added when you get to use an app for free under condition the ad is served to you. And it stops most people from pirating the software.
Consider if Photoshop had ads. Yes it's a ridiculous concept but hear me out. For most people, a Photoshop license is not priced in such a way for them to get it. Not everyone can get the student license. But what if you had an ad-supported version to allow you to use it? For people to try it out and open their doors to image editing, that would be a great experience. The alternative being pirating or using smaller programs or ones without the same industry-vetting.
The problem is a lack of choice. Hulu is free with adds and they have an improved service that costs money but still has adds. There however is no version of Hulu of is add free.
I would gladly pay say 30$ a month for Hulu without adds and some people would pay 100$ a month for the same privilege, but the option is simply not there. Netflix is currently cheap and add free, but the compete for the same content which puts a lot of pressure on Netflix to insert advertising just like DVD/Blue-ray etc and just about every other way to see most of this stuff.
Impossible at buffet pricing, unless it is priced way high, probably higher than would get much total revenue. Hulu pays royalties per view for the premium catalog.
Last I saw hulu was making less than ~40 cents an hour from commercials. Just do the old cellphone deal of X hours a month commercial free for 50 cents an hour * X hours, and there well ahead. Both directly as people pay more, and indirectly when people don't use up all there 'minutes'.
I think it is an overall societal drain, and we're just in the early stages of it.
Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers.
Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots.
So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically.
So that's changing.
Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal.
Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid.
I think there's a market there for the taking.
Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for.
And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize.
I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it.
And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment.
I agree that the market exist for a no-ad, reasonably cost version of program X.
I guess what I'm getting at is how do you try software without 30-day trials, ad-supported free versions, or having to pay a hefty price without test driving?
Good question. From my (limited) perspective, I see nothing wrong with time/feature-limited trials. It's the free food sample at the store. If it's good, it makes me want to buy. If it doesn't, I carry on. Works for me.
And I don't even necessarily see ad-supported free versions as the worst option. A lot of developers find the paid version winds up getting them far more revenue, and from better customers, which magnifies the gains. So if that's a good gateway for them, great, and if that's a good filter by which to learn that they should ditch the free version, even better.
I don't love it. I think a truly enlightened society would look for better ways to connect customers with the products they'd enjoy and find value in, but having an ad-supported version plus a paid version, seems to be a step in the right direction. One could argue that's what's being done by networks who broadcast their shows for free and sell them on iTunes/Amazon, but I'd like it if: they came out at the same time, and if it wasn't clear the ad-supported model is largely necessary because most of their products are garbage, and they rely on the big hits to subsidize their general lack of taste. (Same goes for the music industry.)
Now, I've made donations to sites that disable the ads for donors, and I get why they do that. I don't judge the guys who see an ad-supported version as their only potential way of gaining some traction (though I might not always agree with that assessment). They're scrappy, and doing what they have to.
What I think really drives me nuts is this frantic, 90s-like gold rush push for the ability to corner the market on every square inch at which eyeballs point, with the aim towards placing corporate sponsorship there. And hey, for the square-inches that aren't digital, let's put glasses between your eyes and it!
(Don't get me wrong, wearable displays will be massively useful, and massively 'disruptive,' to use the local dialect, but I'd just as soon get mine from someone who wants to make a really good one, and sell it to me for a profit, and then carry on designing the next, even better one, as opposed to spending most of their time thinking about how to monetize my life even more. But that's probably just me.)
I have vowed never to watch anything live. Always recorded on DVR with fast forwarding through Ads. The day they disable fast forwarding Ads is the day I completely throw out my TV.
It's not just me. It's tens of millions of paying customers. The other pay TV services are the same. It matters not what the example is, the point is that companies display ads to paying customers and have for some time now. So we should not be surprised when other companies start doing this.
I'd much rather see ads during TV than have to personally cover much more of the cost producing the shows I want to watch. Just keep in mind that there are other perspectives out there. I know some people hate ads and would rather pay more, and I don't blame them for that, but I'm largely the opposite.
(This breaks down some for internet display ads where there are privacy concerns with the data being tracked, unlike with broadcast-to-everyone TV ads; I'm not aware of how much data is shared between advertisers and such with this program for W8 apps to know just how big of an issue that might be.)
I've moved to paying for content. In fact, at one point I shut off all content I wasn't directly paying for. A few things happened:
• The S/N got astonishingly better.
• The time spent on it was much lower.
• What I got out of it was more nuanced, and impacted me more deeply.
Now, a few other things happened: I missed some things, some of which was good (well-reasoned debates on HN, for example), some of which was the equivalent of junk food (tech news updates), but still not without some utility and applicability.
I also decided some of my subscription content really wasn't worth it, because it started to feel an awful lot closer to the ad supported stuff I'd just detox'd off of, than the higher quality stuff I was paying for.
I also missed some really, really good 'blogs from people who are respected industry figures, and run the 'blog more to make sure they stay respected industry figures, than to directly profit from them. Those are back in the (much reduced) fray.
Which is all to say: I think if we paid directly for the content we consumed on TV, it could work out OK. And, once the industry realizes its model is unsustainable, everything will cost less to produce, and, hopefully, buy. (Think of sending $5-7 to an artist for their album, as opposed to paying ≥$10-15 to pay a lot of guys whose ability to add value is ever declining.) I'd just as soon watch 2-3 really superb TV shows per week and pay $100-300/year than spend that (or more) for the same stuff, plus a whole lot of noise and bloat. I think we'd come out of the other end better for it, and with more to show.
At the risk of being hastily axiomatic, I could say that everyone's beholden to someone. Or, at least, content creators who want to be paid for their work, are. I'd rather they be primarily beholden to the customer, than to the advertiser, or the political climate and/or government, etc. Any other arrangement, to me, seems too compromised, if for no other reason than because a direct wallet-vote seems to be the most powerful.
I didn't do it by drawing a line between paid content and content-with-advertising, but over the past two years I've also dramatically cut the amount of TV I watch. I watch about one to three hours of non-sports television per week, on Hulu Plus or Netflix. My sports-watching is mostly background material while doing other stuff, and I don't have cable, but subscribe to things like MLB.TV for it, which (like Hulu Plus or cable) is a paid + advertising model. I did it as an experiment when moving to see how long I could get by without cable and a DVR and hours of TV shows per week, and found out I just didn't miss it that much at all. But for the stuff I do watch, I enjoy the big production budgets that advertising pays for.
But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. Commercials just pretty much wash over me (and internet banner ads I usually don't even notice at all). Sure, there's a not-really-personally-noticed branding effect, especially with interruptive TV ads, but I just don't care if my purchase of paper towels or whatever ends up subconsciously influenced by commercials.
But, all that said, and more back to the original topic, ads in apps are one of the areas where I'm more frequently willing to pay to remove them. It's a question of consuming versus using, and wanting to maximize my screen space.
And I think it's fascinating how easily iOS and Android (I don't remember any ads in Symbian smartphone apps, though I never really used Windows Mobile, so maybe they were there?) slipped the idea of in-app ads into the world, after the desktop app world avoided them for so long.
But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do.
I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.)
Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing.
And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on.
And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it.
That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it.
I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest.
I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.
Sure, I think most people aren't that unhappy about TV ads. I very possibly get a better deal from ITV at £0/year plus ads than £145/year to the BBC with no ads. $100/month and ads seemed pretty expensive to me, that's all - but really my point was just that regardless of what the parent poster pays for TV and still gets ads, that doesn't justify similar behaviour in a completely different industry.
Who's saying there's a difference? That there isn't is the point.
In fact, if there is a difference, it's that operating systems are far more integrated into both my personal and professional lives, both in terms of time and functional integration. The last thing I want is for the rest of my life to be as whored out and substance-free as television.
Wondering how are they going to sort things out when Gmail is ad supported (perfectly fine with that, although no ads via IMAP / Android app) vs a product you're actually paying for.
I almost felt sympathetic for their efforts with their new ecosystem. Close, but no cigar. Windows 7 stays till supported. Which, for the Professional version, is actually 2020 aka more than the average lifespan of the hardware itself.
You may not be able to get a no-ads version of Win8, but let me observe that I didn't even know Win8 had ads until this article- I've never opened those apps.
Same here, I didn't notice until checking the sports app. I was like wtf, until I realized it was in the app not the OS itself, on an app that makes sense (sports products in the sports app oh nooo) and it was the last thing in the list of big ol' tiles. VLC doesn't have apps, OS functions don't, Office didn't, just the store apps.
Now if they ever do move into my other programs or into the core OS itself i'll have an issue, they aren't really that bad as it stands. (watch video before opening third party programs for instance.) I highly doubt they'll go there though.
It's just like Android, they're part of a system image. No conspiracy here. It's likely due to some intricacies of licensing Windows Store apps which I'll not get into.
That hasn't been true for well over a year, probably a year and a half now. Running apps don't use CPU, default apps (now) don't often have services anyways so. yeah
I have to say, as much as I didn't want to have to say it. Microsoft outdid themselves with windows 8. I just bought a new Asus laptop and I didn't notice when I ordered that it said windows 8 (which is really really not like me) and when I got it I almost installed seven right over it. Instead I gave it a fair shot and damn it if it turns out I like it. The interface changes flow real nice for me. The apps it comes with are good (the store is lacking bad but time should help that issue) and the one program I couldn't install was for mounting an .iso (which is a huge deal for me) and turns out you can right click (or double click) and it mounts it and proceeds into the root of the image, so that won it bonus points. Obviously I've had it less the twenty four hours, but it's already growing on me.
I really did think it was going to be a vista fiasco all over again, I can say I'm dropped by how well Microsoft managed to release an I-didn't-find-a-bug-within-minutes(hours even) new operating system. Which gets me even more because it's such a deviation from prior version of windows.
Interesting. To summarize, the article is arguing that if you pay for a service, you shouldn't be shown ads. What about your monthly cable subscription? What about Hulu? Even as a Hulu Plus member you are subjected to ads. Ads are simply another revenue model for parent company, in this case Microsoft, and for the channel, in this case the app.
If Windows adopted a freemium model I don't think it will attract many more users - I doubt there are consumers deterred form using Windows because of the price tag. I think this is the unfortunate future of desktop OSs though, with Ubuntu adding ads (or links to products they get a slice from) with local search results.
I think it's wrong to compare this - useless ads on a product you pay for, with Ubuntu - search functionality that happens to benefit a specific provider, on a free OS, which is removable by a single command.
I think the article writer doesnt differntiate between the Win OS itself and the content–free apps that comes installed by default in the modern interface! I think Microsoft has a full right to put ads on these apps as they are 1)Free 2) They are an interface if thier content–based websites which have ads anyway.
I think your second point is right on. These are beautified websites that contain really unobtrusive ads, the "apps" just being a bookmark pinned to the start screen. I'd rather have that then a cluttered website in a web-browser with obtrusive ads. Though, in my use-case, I'm mainly in the desktop away from those apps, anyway.
Matter of fact, pushing ads in your face is the only reason Google funds android. They don't even want you to pay them. The SOLE reason for it's existence is for you to click their ads.
What a load of absolute crap. Have you ever even picked up an Android phone? In no way does Google "push ads in your face". In fact, none of the Google apps included with Android have ads. Third party apps may have ads, but that is no different from any other mobile platform.
Google funds Android to promote Google services. Whether Google services pushes ads in your face or not has absolutely nothing to do with Android.
I was surprised to see ads after installing Windows 8. I don't remember seeing any in the customer preview. Immediately changed my hosts file. I hates ads...
>> Do you want to be the product being sold? You decide.
I wonder how many ads are for other ad supported products which in turn have ads for other ad supported products. Does the chain ever end? Sure Microsoft might make an extra few bucks, but I can't see this being a good long term strategy for their brand.
Windows 8 isn't bad or good. It depends what _you_ use it for.
Ads get in the way for me. Some people don't mind ads. I use computers to code, multitask and use open source software. The majority of people don't do these things, so Windows 8 is a perfect piece of software for them. You don't use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, and Windows is just a tool. It depends if you like the software.
The rage on the Amazon search results was especially because of file search keywords were being sent to Canonical and Amazon to show the ads. Here the ads are part of apps and as far as I can tell, no personal info is uploaded to Microsoft to personalize the ads.
I know that and you know that, but I don't get the impression that that's why people were angry. I know the EFF went at it from the privacy angle and the privacy/gaudy-ness of it is what bothers me... but most people who were just "raging" about it were upset at the perception that Canonical was selling out or that they were tainting the out-of-box experience or making Ubuntu into adware.
For me, it's incredibly, incredibly simple to remove from Unity... and it's completely free. Windows, not so much on either count.
It certainly is a way for Microsoft to make more advertising revenue in the same way that iAds does the same for Apple, AdMob does for Android, and AdSense does for Google Search. The only novel thing I see here is that the ads are for desktop apps.